Black serif lettering reading NEVER TRUST THE LIVING across the fingers of a hand resting on a marble table, with mint nail varnish.

Lettering across fingers on a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand resting palm down on a pale marble surface, with words tattooed across the fingers in black serif capitals. The words read NEVER, TRUST, THE and LIVING, running across the knuckles and finger joints, with solid black ink and soft shading. The composition is taken from above at an angle, with a glass of water visible in the top left corner.

Lettering Hand Word Lettering Finger Hand Nail polish Glass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion had been Maud's idea, and by the time the bunting was up in the village hall nobody could remember agreeing to it. Forty-one of them had sat in Miss Pargeter's schoolroom the winter the flood took the bridge, and twelve were still alive to come. The rest were on the churchyard wall or under it.

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Tom Ashby arrived last, in a coat too good for him, and sat at the end of the trestle with a cup of tea he did not touch. Nobody asked where he had been. Everybody knew he had been dead since Michaelmas, because Maud had carried the lamp to his wake herself. A dead man at a school dinner was no great scandal in those parts, but the way he kept watching the door was. He looked like someone expecting a late pupil.

Old Ruth Pargeter, who had taught them all and outlived most of their fathers, took the chair beside him. She said nothing for a long while. Then she reached across the cloth and turned his hand over, and the lamplight found the ink on his fingers, the words marching across the knuckles in plain black capitals.

"You always were a clever boy," she said. "I told you what the rule was, and you wrote it where you'd see it every morning." Tom looked at his hand as if it belonged to somebody else. He got up before the pudding and walked out into the wet, and by the time the urn was refilled the chair was empty and the tea in his cup had gone cold.